Introduction
Illustrations by Betty Fraser
The Natural History of Everglades National Park, Florida
Produced by the Division of Publications National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior Washington, D.C. 1988
About This Book
Here is the story of the plants and animals of the Everglades, this country’s subtropical kingdom. Plants and animals found nowhere else in the 50 states are found here in abundance, though in an increasingly perilous state. In this handbook, first published in 1972, author and researcher Jean Craighead George brings to the telling of this story long years of study and understanding. Checklists and glossaries at the back buttress her account of the natural history of this national park.
National Park Handbooks, compact introductions to the great natural and historic places administered by the National Park Service, are published to support the National Park Service’s management programs at the parks and to promote understanding and enjoyment of the parks. Each is intended to be informative reading and a useful guide before, during, and after a park visit. More than 100 titles are in print. This is Handbook 143. You may purchase the handbooks through the mail by writing to Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402.
Library of Congress card number: 73-600077 ISBN 0-912627-29-8
★GPO: 1987—181-917/60504
Preface vii America’s Subtropical Wonderland 1 Pine Rockland 7 Tree-Island Glades 12 Mangrove Swamp 16 Florida Bay and the Coastal Prairie 21 Big Cypress Swamp 26 Plant-and-Animal Communities 29 Tropical Hardwood Hammock 30 Cypress Head 35 Bayhead 38 Willow Head 40 Web of Life in the Marsh 42 Alligator Hole in the Glades 45 Discovering Everglades Plants and Animals 49 Air Plants 52 Mammals 59 Birds 64 Reptiles and Amphibians 70 Fishes 72 Animals without Backbones 75 Indians of the Everglades 77 Appendix 80 Glossary 81 For Reading and Reference 84 Rare and Endangered Animals 86 Checklist of Mammals 87 Checklist of Birds 88 Checklist of Reptiles and Amphibians 96 Checklist of Trees 98
[Illustration: EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK]
[Illustration: Alligator nest]
PREFACE
The shimmering waters of the everglades creep silently down the tip of Florida under warm subtropical skies. In a vast, shallow sheet this lazy river idles through tall grasses and shadowy forests, easing over alligator holes and under bird rookeries, finally mingling with the salty waters of Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico in the mangrove swamps. From source to sea, all across the shallow breadth of this watery landscape, life abounds.
Everglades National Park is to most Americans an Eden where birds, mammals, reptiles, and orchids find sanctuary. Sunshine sparkles on sloughs teeming with fish, and on marshes where wildflowers bloom the year around; it shines on tree islands where birds roost and deer bed down. In this semitropical garden of plant-and-animal communities, every breeze-touched glade, every cluster of trees is a separate world in which are tucked yet smaller worlds of such complexity that even ecologists have not learned all their intricate relationships.
This book has been written to help you see how the many pieces of this ecological puzzle fit together to form a complex, ever-changing, closely woven web of plants, animals, rock, soil, sun, water, and air.
AMERICA’S SUBTROPICAL WONDERLAND
Everglades may not be our largest national park (that honor belongs to Wrangell-St. Elias in Alaska), but it is certainly the wettest. During and after the rainy season, when not only the mangrove swamp but also the sawgrass prairie is under water, most of the park abounds in fish and other water life, and even the white-tailed deer leads a semi-aquatic existence.
Despite the fact that it is low, flat, and largely under water, Everglades is a park of many environments: shallow, key-dotted Florida Bay; the coastal prairie; the vast mangrove forest and its mysterious waterways; cypress swamps; the true everglades—an extensive freshwater marsh dotted with tree islands and occasional ponds; and the driest zone, the pine-and-hammock rockland.
The watery expanse we call “everglades,” from which the park gets its name, lies only partly within the park boundaries. Originally this river flowed, unobstructed though very slowly, southward from Lake Okeechobee more than 100 miles to Florida Bay. It is hardly recognizable as a river, for it is 50 miles wide and averages only about 6 inches deep, and it creeps rather than flows. Its source, the area around Lake Okeechobee, is only about 15 feet above sea level, and the riverbed slopes southward only 2 or 3 inches to the mile.
As you can see by the maps on pages 2 and 3, the works of man have greatly altered the drainage patterns and the natural values of south Florida, and you can imagine how this has affected the supply of water—the park’s lifeblood.
The park’s array of plants and animals is a blend of tropical species, most of which made their way across the water from the Caribbean islands, and species from the Temperate Zone, which embraces all of Florida. All of these inhabitants exist here through adaptation to the region’s peculiar cycles of flood, drought, and fire and by virtue of subtle variations in temperature, altitude, and soil.
[Illustration: HISTORIC DRAINAGE PATTERNS OF SOUTH FLORIDA]
[Illustration: DRAINAGE PATTERNS OF SOUTH FLORIDA TODAY]
[Illustration: PLANT COMMUNITIES OF EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK
The horizontal distance represented on this diagram, from the Pineland to Florida Bay, is 15 miles. With a greatly exaggerated vertical scale, the difference between the greatest elevation of the pine ridge and the bottom of the Florida Bay marl bed is only 14 feet.]
FLORIDA BAY (SALT WATER)